Sunday

NY Times Says: "If you dislike health care reform you are a racist homophobic idiot. "

Posted by
Southern Man

The left has truly lost their collective minds. History is being rewriten to support laughable theroies and to discredit the outrage felt by Americans as their leaders ignore their wishes.

I am more than upset; I am outraged by the assertions made in this article that the genuine frustration felt by voters in this country is nothing more than the racist and homophobic rantings of the right. How dare this man impugn what he obviously does not understand.

This juvenile ranting disguised as an objective opinion piece (I know that's an oxymoron.) appeared on the New York Times Site.

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.

But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

All of the allegations that protesters acted inappropriately seem to lack any substantive proof. I would stop just short of saying they are completely made up. I am however comfortable stating that they are greatly exaggerated. If it were otherwise you can be sure that footage of the alleged misconduct would be endlessly running on CNN, MSNBC and the like.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

Convenient how a "reporter" knows so little about journalism. It seems our esteemed author chose only to mention threats to the left when there have been similar threats to Congressman on the right. So much for impartial reporting.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

This is nothing short of unbelievable. Either this guy has not read the bill (which would put him in the company of most law makers) or he is intentionally misrepresenting the facts. You can decide for yourself.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

Nothing like short term memory loss. This hack has forgotten all of the "kill Bush" rhetoric that went on for the last eight years. No one has written stories depicting the assassination of Obama like they did with Bush. Not that I would condone that action on either side of the political spectrum, it would be nice if the left acknowledged that there are extremists on both sides.

When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

Amazingly enough all those opposing the Civil Rights act were on the left and not the right. The author seems to want to transfer the sins of the left to the right. If they can discredit the resistance, reduce us to nothing more than bigoted homophobes, they can pass their Orwellian measures unopposed.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

The author is right in as much as all of the signature legislation proposed by this administration would feel a significant push back from the people. Where he leaves the realm of the sane is where he makes the assertion that America is pushing back because Obama is black. Bad legislation is bad legislation. The color, race or sexual preferences of the author are irrelevant. To make the case otherwise is to impugn the moral character of everyone who disagrees with Obama's agenda.

But that is the point. Its not about the facts its about destroying the opposition by any means possible. The only saving grace is that most Americans are part of the opposition and are not discouraged by these types of hit pieces; they are enraged and all the more likely to vote their conscience come November.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

This is just unbelievable. I do not have the words to express how much this conglomeration of half truths and faulty assumptions pisses me off. The author is clearly and unequivocally stating that because I am a white conservative I am a racist. How do you respond to something like that?

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

Let's rewrite that statement with the same set of facts but from a different perspective: Amazingly 16 percent of Democrats have crossed over and identified with the Tea Party Movement. Same facts different bias. This guy is simply unhinged from reality.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Its not that leaders are afraid of any one movement. They simply understand that the hate and filth spewed by hack authors, such as the one that penned this piece, contain no truth. They understand that the majority of the people in this country are against what this rouge administration is doing. The Republicans have awoken from the moderate malaise that had clouded their judgment and are acting in accordance with the will of the people. The November elections will bear out which side of this argument is true. We will have to wait until then to write the Democratic epitap.

3 comments:

Often, when a group feels thet they can't lose, you hear what they really think and believe. That is what is going on in the liberal media and the Democrat party right now. They forget that the pendulum will swing back and their left-leaning revelations will be hard to run from when the american people move back to the right.

Wasn't this man a chef or cook or somesuch career who suddenly became a politico? The NYT clearly no longer cares if their writers have truth behind what they write. I don't know why a group of successful conservatives don't band together and buy this failing firm. If that happened I may live to see the Gray Lady rise once again to a serious newspaper.

I am outraged that we have not had the war crimes trials yet, I am sure you care as much as I care about your outrage. We were screwed for 8 years now it is your turn to bend over and squeal like a pig, get over it. Its our crack at fixing this mess, we fixed it in the 90s only to have you fools drag us back to vodoo economics. Stop squealing and whining and take it like a man.